This Thing that Is the Eucharist

I once gave a very kind woman a shock.

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She and I were having a good conversation to while away the time before a flight at the airport, when the subject of the Eucharist arose. A lifelong Unitarian, and a literary scholar, the woman had no personal experience of the sacrament but only an incomprehension or incredulity at the thought of it. She noted that it must be a great obstacle to belief for those who enter the Church. “A Catholic friend of mine tells me that either you grow up believing it or you don’t at all,” she said at last. How many mysteries we dismiss as mere inherited superstitions—bred into us, perhaps, but never something for the mature reason to entertain.

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My response was quick in coming. To the contrary, I replied, I could think of many people who had entered the Church specifically because of the Eucharist and could think of none who had entered in spite of it. Because of her profession, I was most immediately reminded of the writer and painter, David Jones, whose whole understanding of the world culminated in that “gratuitous” but “efficacious sign,” the Eucharist. By this he meant that the Eucharist was a sign that was also the reality toward which it pointed. For an artist who spent his days making images in words and color, Jones’s’ greatest joy was to have a God who could unite sign to reality in the fullness and presence of the sacrament. I proceeded to name other such writers and artists who had found their home in the Church, and yet, what I wanted to say—but did not dare to say—was that I must be numbered among them.

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A decade before, I had thought I had lost the faith into which I had been baptized. It came as no feeling of jubilation but rather of sloth and discontent, if also a kind of relief. Dante’s Divine Comedy had awakened me to a world I’d hardly suspected, a world of spiritual drama, intellectual rigor, precision, and depth, and I saw that that world, in some sense, could be my world, however great the distance between the Catholic corners of the twentieth-century Midwest and the provinces of thirteenth-century Christendom. Enchanting as Dante’s world appeared, it was a poem, a fiction, and so, I had come to believe, was God.

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Dante’s Divine Comedy had awakened me to a world I’d hardly suspected, a world of spiritual drama, intellectual rigor, precision, and depth, and I saw that that world, in some sense, could be my world.

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All but convinced by unbelief, I decided on a caprice to test the hypothesis. I heaved my doubtful body out of bed on Sunday morning and went to Mass at Ann Arbor’s St. Thomas the Apostle Church. I have written about this experience before, and so forgive me if I repeat my own words here: “At Communion, I approached the altar, prepared to receive my unbelief like a seal. When the bread and wine touched my tongue, I received, rather, my belief as a “sacrament.”

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My skin blazed. My heart pounded. My brain swam. What came over me was an overwhelming certitude, but not the kind of certitude that leads one to say, as if it were a personal possession, “This much I know.” To the contrary, the experience became simply one of those facts, like mountains in the distance, or the weather, or traffic—a reality around which one must form one’s sense of reality. It was not what I knew, but simply what was the case, and I had to live with it. The Sacrament was Christ’s body, there before us, there entering us, when we took it upon our tongue.

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In the years ahead, there it stood like a dolmen, solid and immovable, set in the center of my life. Regardless of how my shifty, unreliable, moody thoughts and passions may rise and fall, slosh here and there, the reality that had been given to me remained. It did not care much about my thoughts or my passions. They must rather accept as their task to come to grips with it.

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In the years ahead, there it stood like a dolmen, solid and immovable, set in the center of my life. 

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When, in the heights of heaven, Dante is asked to define faith, he quotes the Letter to the Hebrews: “faith is the substance of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen.” Benedict XVI’s encyclical Spe Salvi considers the meaning of these words. Yes, “faith” can be a disposition of a subject in regard to realities outside the self. But faith is also a gift, an object given through the sacraments to the individual Christian. It is a “substance,” a real being, present even now, of those “things” still to be “hoped for” in the future, by which we mean the fulfillment of Christ’s Kingdom. It is a donum, a given, a fact, present here and now in the soul of the believer, not just a promise, not just a disposition, but an already realized thing.

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I had to get used to living with that reality much the way a college freshman has to get used to living with his roommate. However irritating, it was not going anywhere. But, as you may imagine, it was no mere irritant. It was a provocation to prayer, a gauntlet thrown down, challenging me to holiness, an invitation to enter into a world far greater and larger than any I had known outside the pages of Dante’s poem. I was not worthy of such a gift and I cannot claim I have become any more worthy as the years have passed. But it also was not a gift for me and me alone: the sacrament is there for all of us, calling us to adoration and communion. It binds us together as the Mystical Body of Christ. It makes the kingdom present now, however earthen we vessels may be. It is present even when we are absent; it is real even when our lives feel unreal. It is an obstacle—not to belief, but to unbelief.